Nightmare Labyrinth
by John Carter
Summary: My first fan fic - no flaming!!
1. Default Chapter Title

1 Futile Escape  
  
Colonial Marine Lieutenant Michael P. Hudson stood under the slow spray of the shower, gathering from the inadequate trickle what little comfort and cleanliness could be found. He cramped, as the cubicle was barely large enough to fit his well-built frame - his elbows touched the walls and he had to crouch under the low ceiling.  
  
Water used by the ship was constantly recycled, so the two-minute automatic shut-off was unnecessary, although Hudson restricted his washing to the bare minimum, through habit. He was preparing to turn off the flow when the lights of his cabin were extinguished, and he blinked, disorientated, in the sudden darkness. After a fruitless wait for the emergency back-up power to kick in, he called out to the ship's central AI.  
  
"Mother, I've got a central power failure on C deck, level three. Requesting auxiliary stand-by."  
  
His request was met with silence.  
  
"Mother, how 'bout those arc sodium lamps?"   
  
No response. He swore, hit the cut-off on the shower, then hit it again when the flow failed to cease. After a third strike, the water increased in volume, battering Hudson's startled face. He began beating the button repeatedly to no avail, when a noise met his ears.  
  
The distant rising and falling of a wailing emergency siren echoed throughout the ship. Haunting, mournful, it was accompanied by Mother's coolly impersonal, vaguely feminine tone:  
  
"Intruder alert. Attention all personnel. Xenomorph life forms have been detected. Full-scale evacuation is now in effect. Attention all personnel..."  
  
Hudson froze. The message repeated itself, and dull, overpowering orange emergency lights suddenly flooded his cabin. They faded in and out, at their worst leaving the cabin in darkness, and at their best immersing it totally, blinding him. His vision was filled with its corona's after-image, like after having a photo taken.   
  
Fade out. Hudson was left in darkness again, and he searched for the button to open the shower cubicle. Hit it. The door opened an inch, then jammed stuck.  
  
Fade in. He was locked inside the cubicle. The water continued to pelt onto his head, his shoulders. He was considering trying to climb the shower's slippery plasti-steel walls, when the lights faded out, and Mother's message continued:  
  
"Critical hull damage sustained on E deck, floors two and three. Hull exterior has been breached. Warning, depressurization of these areas is imminent. Emergency airlocks are being set in place. Evacuation is imperative. Attention all person- Warning. Xenomorph life forms have been detected. Movement of unauthorized life forms has been detected on decks C and E. All personnel are ordered to evacuate immediately..."  
  
Fade in, the orange light changed to red but not diminished in power. Hudson was still, listening for signs of life underneath the wailing of the siren, as it rose and fell. Nothing. He continued to listen. A tense minute passed...  
  
"Critical hull damage sustained on C deck, floors three and four. Hull exterior has been breached. Warning, depressurization of this area is imminent. Emergency airlocks are being..."  
  
His quadrant! Hudson was reeling from the shock of this last announcement, not thinking clearly, when it happened. The sinister, barely audible tinkling of many legs crawling across metal. Scuttle - scuttle! Hudson peered through the space in the shower door.   
  
Fade out. Pitch darkness. Silence. Water streamed down his back, in his eyes. He strained to see. As his eyes swept over the claustrophobic confines of his cabin, he suddenly spied a small form - a darker black on black. He watched intently as it throbbed...  
  
Fade in! He thrust himself away from the space so as not to be seen, hiding, panting. The siren's wail rose.   
  
"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus fifteen minutes. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."  
  
Desperate, Hudson searched the cubicle for a chance to escape. The showerhead looked sturdy enough to smash the plasti-steel shower screen. He pulled at the spray fixture, tested its strength, but there was no way he could remove it from the wall. If he wanted out, there was only one option left. With a deep breath, he braced himself, leg raised in an attempt to smash down the door...  
  
Fade out...  
  
Some intense, perceptive instinct sensed it before it happened. Some flicker of movement on the periphery of his vision, that sinister blacker shade of black on black, in that split second triggering some primal survival mechanism. Halting his resolve to smash the screen, pushing him against the wet walls of the cubicle.  
  
The dark shape hit the screen, holding onto the wall, tail; a coiled line of tension and vicious strength, whip-lashing at a ferocious rate, searching through the gap in the shower screen for purchase on human flesh. In its thrashing fury it slashed Hudson's chest, cutting through muscle like hot steel through butter.   
  
Hudson's reactions, initially hampered by fear at the suddenness of the attack, finally kicked into gear. He slammed the screen back into place to close the aperture, and for an instant he felt a sculptured, alien pressure between the door and the wall, and was sure he would squash the bastard.   
  
But in a movement too fast for human eye to register, it propelled itself into the cubicle, impossibly scuttling across walls slick with water, towards Hudson's face.  
  
Adrenaline fueled his actions, and he rammed the screen with his shoulder, fell, tumbling, naked, out of the recess, the buckled plasti-steel screen clanging onto the floor, the siren wailing, the light fading out, the alien springing off the far wall in a trajectory for the back of his skull. Hudson clambered to his feet and ran.  
  
The screen came to a spinning halt on the floor before his shins, and his legs clipped it, he sprawled onto the floor, the wind knocked out of him.  
The action had just saved his life.  
  
The face-hugger flew over his head, missing its target, and Hudson rolled right, slamming into the metal desk, his hand automatically groping for his handgun. Found it.  
  
Fade in, and in a breathtakingly powerful snapshot in time he saw it, illuminated by the strobe lighting, as if in a moment frozen, airborne, before his bewildered gaze. And fired.   
  
It flew back, shattered, propelled, by the 45ACP FMJ round, spewing geysers of yellow death, corroding the room, giving off the odd stench of burning flesh...?  
  
He looked down, startled, and could see his collarbone...  
  
Diving into the cubicle, dousing the liquid fire entering his body, screaming in shock and beginning to feel the pain. His shallowly cut chest and dissolving skin screamed at his nerve endings, pain receptors, brain, as the water hammered away at the multiple wounds.  
  
Fade out.  
  
"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus fourteen minutes. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."  
  
Hudson lay, unable to think, react, feeling only pain, pain, pain. His body shook as adrenaline wore off and shock fell neatly into place. In fourteen minutes, he told himself.  
  
In fourteen minutes this section of the ship will be deadlocked by ten meters of solid titanium steel. A few minutes after that, and depressurization will kick in. That gives me fourteen minutes-  
  
"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus thirteen minutes, forty-five seconds. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."  
  
-fourteen minutes and counting... to get from here to the escape pods. Christ.  
  
From the floor, slouched, he could still see his weapon rack. A small red light blinked. His pulse rifle was not yet charged. And yet out there, more of those... bugs.   
Bigger. Smarter. Stronger...  



	2. Chapter 2

2 Desperate Alliance   
  
Armed with a smart-gun and a confidence more tenuous than actual, Warrant Officer Second-Class Beverly M. Rogan made careful, tense progress through the poorly-lit corridors of the ship. The massive, bulky weapon was slung low on her hips, sophisticated servomechanisms whining softly in the darkness, adjusting to the clenching of her abdominal muscles as she took deep, controlled breaths. Her long, flowing hair fell around her face, obscuring her full lips and deep brown eyes, wide with the effort of peering into the darkness, pupils dilated.  
  
A sudden noise wheeled her around, gasping, to the black expanse of mocking silence. Her motion sensors registered nil, but she remained, waiting for the sounds to continue.   
  
There! Unmistakable now, the furtive scuffling drifting crisply through the air to her ears. Through that door, she was sure of it. Long muzzle trained to the floor before her, Beverly crept alongside the cabin's threshold, fight or flight instincts imperceptibly quickening her pulse. She dropped one hand from the weapon to operate the door, bracing for the attack...  
  
With a whoosh! of hydraulics and an outrush of steam, the hatch slid down, Beverly sidestepping into the aperture, gun training to the figure, her trigger finger tensing...  
  
"Oh God shit no!" Hudson blurted, flinching from the expected fusillade.  
  
But she gasped in surprise, yanking on the barrel of the gun, forcing it away to point at the wall. Hudson opened his clenched eyes, realizing his doom had been averted, calming down. He watched her look at him, around the room, then back to him. She stepped into the room, nearly crushing the remains of the facehugger, and jumping back in disgust. She cried out.   
  
"It's okay, it's dead! Take it easy." He was up now, on unsteady legs, putting on lower armour plates to cover his nakedness.  
  
"What the hell happened here?" She spoke calmly, smoothly. Hudson looked up at her, for the first time taking her in, and liked doing so.  
  
"Ah... guess I had a bit of... alien trouble."  
  
She gave him a critical look. He thought about the stupidity of what he'd just said, and gave a shaky laugh. C'mon soldier, he thought, you've just looked death in the face twice in the space of two minutes. The least you could've done is come up with a snappy comeback. He laughed again, his laughter giving way to coughing and uncontrollable spluttering. Flecks of red phlegm spattered onto the floor before him.  
  
"Oh Jesus," she said, moving over to him concernedly, eyeing the dissolved flesh around his collarbone, "you okay?"  
  
He gained control of his throat spasms, swallowed something lumpy. "Yeah, fine," he croaked.   
  
"Listen, we don't have much time. I've just come from A deck, there's no-one…" She cleared her throat, gained composure, "I'm the only crew member left. Marines have been evacuated. That means we're on our own."  
  
He nodded, donning a chest plate and tightening it. She moved over to the charge rack and tried to remove the pulse rifle.  
  
"There's an emergency over-ride panel for the airlocks with the atmosphere cooling units. That's level four, but I don't know if Mother's included the airlifts in the auxiliary power." She jiggled the pulse rifle on the charge rack, trying to pull it off. "How do you-"  
  
"Forget about it, it's not charged. So what if she hasn't?"  
  
"What? Oh, there's a service tunnel that runs under that whole maintenance complex. It's great for-"  
  
"And it's also the first place they'll secure for themselves. It's got the greatest mobility and it's at the perfect temperature."  
  
She blinked. "Who are 'they'?"  
  
Hudson sighed.  
  
"Just how much experience have you had with xenomorphs, Ms...?"  
  
"Beverly, just Beverly. Ah, well, none really."  
  
"Uh-huh."  
  
She looked uncomfortable.  
  
"I'm sorry, don't take it personally. Look, there's not much-"   
  
Mother's warning droned on again. Beverly made quieting motions.   
  
"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus eleven minutes, fifteen seconds. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."  
  
"Well, there you go," she said, "not much at all."  
  
He grabbed his Hammerli Target handgun and chambered in a fresh clip.  
  
"Let's go kill us some aliens."  
  
Back in the battlefield, Hudson was surprised at his steely resolve, the total control he had over himself despite the situation. In a way it was all so familiar; the adrenaline, the power coursing through his veins, the way the gun felt like an extension of himself, capable and deadly and full of fluid, sleek grace. Just like the battles he'd fought before. Just like the eight months he'd served on Martian Outpost Stevenson, when the civil war had flared up so suddenly and violently.  
  
Only this time there was one, important difference. The enemy.   
  
The enemy had the advantage. The enemy had the same fluid, hideous grace, the same steely resolve, the superior accentuated sensory capabilities, and the black, alien soul, devoid of emotion beyond the constant drive of survival. They were self-aware to a limited degree, comprising of a whole consciousness, each worker's thoughts and actions stemming from the Queen and the Hive. Such tactical precision resulted in unsurpassed teamwork, and although each individual lacked in intellectual faculties, a group of xenomorphs resembled a dynamic, synchronized tactical assault team.   
  
They were fast, too, lithe and agile in a way no Earthly being could imitate. Hudson remembered the facehugger he'd fought in the shower, remembered the horrified fascination he'd experienced as it scuttled - no, flew - along the wall towards his face. The bigger ones could do that too, for them, the ceiling was just as easily a wall as the floor a ceiling. Their armaments, slime-lubricated talons and biomechanical jaws, could tear through D-grade titanium steel like a laser-wire through human flesh.   
  
There was only one downfall to these perfect-killing machines: their strength and stamina. While a human could quite easily sustain a few pulse shots to the chest, a xenomorph's physical structure would lose integrity and fly apart in a shower of acid. Also, their internal temperature regulators were not as sophisticated as that of the human being. The heat generated from a steaming pool was enough to cause discomfort.   
  
But when taken into consideration with their number, dexterity, and team-minded simplicity, these were minor quibbles. Put a human in a pitch-black room with a xenomorph, neither with any weapons but the physical capabilities of each species, there was no question as to who would survive. The xenomorph was designed for killing. Pure and simple. It killed to live and lived to kill. And in an environment with nowhere to run and everywhere to hide, it was of little surprise that Hudson was starting to get so goddamned jumpy...  



	3. Chapter 3

3 Midnight Armada  
  
It started around the first corner. The corridor joined to the floor's main atrium at right angles, both alternately dark and stark in the ebbing strobe pulse from the arc sodium emergency lights. They slowed when approaching the corner; it was a vulnerable position and both felt instinctively exposed. Hudson eyed Beverly's arms, slick with sweat and coursing with muscle, straining under the constant weight of the huge weapon. He touched her bare arm to get her attention.  
"You sure you're okay with that gun?" he whispered.   
She started to nod, but her saw otherwise in her eyes.  
"Here," he said, unclasping the restraints on her shoulder, "let me handle it." She withdrew under the weapon, emerging up again visibly relieved, rubbing her free back where the weapon had exerted its weight. Hudson donned the smart-gun and fastened it around his waist. "Take this," he said, handing her the Hammerli, "the magazine's fresh. Anytime you're out," he reached into his belt, "just slip this one in."  
"Okay," she whispered, holding the piece awkwardly.   
"You shouldn't need anymore ammo than that, but if you do," his hands reached for the familiar controls of the smart-gun, and he engaged the "track" mode, "just call out."  
"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus ten minutes. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."  
"We're going to make it, okay?" she said shakily.  
He glanced at her suddenly, and saw the fear in her wide brown eyes. Reaching over, he clasped her hand, and she held onto his fiercely.  
"We're going to make it," he said, trying to put strength into his voice. "Now, let's do it!"  
With renewed determination they slid around the corner, eyes darting to the corners, as the light faded out...  
And stayed out.   
"Shit."  
"It's okay, don't panic." In the darkness, he patted down his vest. There! Three bulky items, emergency flares, standard Colonial Marine issue. He withdrew one and twisted the cap, blue sparks sputtered and their surroundings were illuminated garishly. In the whitish glare they continued on. Hudson stopped.  
"You'll have to hold this for me. I need..."  
"Okay, okay," she took the flare and held it above them.  
Mother marked their desperate progress through the dank regions of the ship. Beverly's sense of geography was strong, as when they had reached the airlifts only two minutes had passed, but they had been the longest two minutes of Hudson's life. Inspecting the instrumentation panel of the lifts, Beverly made her diagnosis.  
"Looks like the lifts lost auxiliary power with the lights," she said, and straightened, sighing. "The only option left is the service tunnel."  
"We can't-"  
"It's our only choice," she cut in sternly, above Mother's intonations, "and as much as I like it, it's our only hope. Now, unless you'd rather wait here in the slim chance that auxiliary kicks back in, we'd better move."  
She handed the flare to Hudson and knelt next to the lifts, where, close to the ground, the access lid blocked the entrance to the service tunnel. In the increasingly dimming light of the dying flare, she worked, and the lid was nearly loose when she halted. Turning cautiously, she looked into the dark of the corridor.  
"What is it?" Hudson asked.  
"Didn't you see? I think-"  
Dong dong dong! The hollow resounding of an object striking metal emitted successively from the depths of the expanse. Beverly drew in a sharp breath. Hudson vainly waved the fading embers of the flare before them, and in a last, acrid sputter, the flare displayed the intruder, and promptly died. In dramatic relief, its silhouette materialized, moving with deadly speed across the ceiling. Hudson took a final glance of its sleek, elongated skull as the world was cast in darkness again, and pushed Beverly out of harm's way.  
"Get down!" he yelled, and ran to the side, strafing the ceiling, the weapon's retort startling in the quiet. It bucked considerably, and he wasn't ready to compensate. The shots flared into the dark, lighting up the flexing talons and pumping jaws of the apparition as it jumped onto the floor, and rose, to impossible heights, before him, squealing. Hudson froze, transfixed in bewildered horror as the monstrosity clambered towards him, unable to fire. The alien stood between him and Beverly's shrouded figure; any shots fired from his smart-gun would rupture the enemy's brittle frame and kill her, as well. Hudson knew this.   
But Beverly didn't. Watching the ensuing scene with terrified confusion, she drew the weapon and held it outstretched, bracing...  
The alien advanced, hissing and inspecting Hudson's quivering self with long snout and probing eyes. Its slime-saponaceous jaws detached slowly, revealing its snake-like inner-mouth and the stench of certain death. The mouth opened before Hudson's left eyeball, preparing to puncture to the soft brain tissue beneath...  
When Beverly fired: a first, wild shot that ricocheted off the wall and sent the alien spinning, crying out in surprise to deal with the sudden threat. Forgotten, Hudson pulled the ring off the grenade he'd been hiding, and with a cry of his own, threw it to the ground and ran towards Beverly.  
The encroaching xenomorph turned at the sound, and she fired again. Its left arm exploded wetly, hard shell flying through the air with the gun that had spun out of her grip.   
Running, Hudson reached into the air and caught the stray handgun that had met his path. The grenade's smoke had started to give off a red hue, meaning they had little time…  
Beverly gave the panel a final pull, and it yielded to expose the cylindrical tunnel and its inhabitants...  
Hudson shouted something over the pained mewling of the creature, but Beverly did not hear. With a short gasp that betrayed the beginnings of a scream, her ankle was clutched viciously, and she was pulled down the tunnel by nightmares cloaked in black.  
Hudson barely noticed. The hopelessly flailing creature struck out in a last attempt, talons barely connecting with his skull, as he leaped into the yawning mouth of the access tunnel and slid into darkness...  



End file.
